Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist born in Glasgow in 1966.

Having begun his career as a performance artist, he has later embraced a variety of different mediums and disciplines. The result is a diverse body of works, which has grown to include video, sound photographic objects and texts aimed at teasing viewers’ perceptions, memories and expectations.

After winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1996, Gordon represented Great Britain at the 1997 Venice Biennale. One year later, in 1998, he won the Hugo Boss Prize, awarded annually by the Guggenheim Museum to an exceptional emerging or mid-career artist. Whether in the form of film, performance, video installation, sculpture, photography, or conceptual text, his production explores such themes as time, identity, self-image, and mortality, as well as darkness, power, collective memory, or morality. Using literature, folklore, and iconic Hollywood films in addition to his own footage, drawings, and writings, he distorts time and language in order to disorient and challenge.

Douglas Gordon

Throughout his diverse practice—spanning photography, video, performance, sound, and text-based work—Douglas Gordon recontextualizes familiar images and artworks, distorting time, language, and other aesthetic aspects to challenge viewers’ perception, expectation, and memory.

Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) investigates time, mortality, collective memory, and identity through photography, installations, video art, as well as sculpture and texts. By exploring a variety of mediums and art forms, Gordon readjusts scenes, tinkers with time, and appropriates cultural sources.

Skulls are a recurring subject in Gorgon´s production: for several years, the artist has been collecting skulls, into which he has five-pointed stars incised for each year of his life. Taken from Re-Object/Mythos, a portfolio of 6, Fourty is a photograph on baryta paper with cut-out holes, mounted on acrylic mirror. The work depicts a skull incised with forty stars, one for each year of the artist’s life at the time of its creation. The cutout eyes disclose a mirror, transforming the photograph into a contemporary memento mori which eerily embraces the viewer.

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“If you want to find the truth in something, take it apart piece by piece, then put it back together with the detail of a forensic scientist.„

—Douglas Gordon